FreeBSD 5.4 no inodes left

[Alex Franks]

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org] On Behalf Of Philip Radford
Sent: Wednesday, September 20, 2006 7:55 AM
To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
Subject: FreeBSD 5.4 no inodes left

Hi All,

I am running FreeBSD 5.4 and have recently received the following
message on our box for the /var partiton.
No inodes left.

I have checked the statistics and there was an apache httpd log which
was maxing out the usable space. I have since removed this file and the
available space has dropped to over 50%. However I still get the 'no
inodes left' message even though I have freed the space.

Does anyone know how I can get the inodes to be freed up on the /var
partition.

Thanks in advance.

Regards
Phil.


Hey all,

I recently had the *exact* same problem on a 4.11-STABLE box. Plenty of
disc space on /var but out of inodes. Also, the system was incredibly
sluggish despite showing loads of 0.00 across the board in uptime and
top.

This problem coincided with a LOT of sleeping and zombie processes. I
had a cron job running every 5 minutes and couldn't even edit the
crontab because of the lack of inodes. I ended up just wiping out all
the directories under /var/db/pkg (since these can easily be downloaded
again) and shut off the cron jobs that were spawning new procs.

Turns out (part of?) the problem was qmail had a very large amount of
messages in its queue. Once I flushed qmail's queue and the messages
were sent out, the system returned to normal.

Hope this helps you or someone else.